FernFolio » hockey

Clancy with the Puck by Chris Mizzoni

fernfolio — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:56:31 +0000

Traded to the Hogtown Maple Buds near the end of the regular season, Clancy Cooke helps his new team make the playoffs. With his skating and stick handling, Maple Buds fans believe, the team has a real shot at the Stanley Cup.
The visitors take an early lead in that seventh game of the finals, but Clancy scores two quick goals to tie it up. It looks like the game will go into overtime when the visitors get another goal past the Buds’ goalie, putting the score at four goals to three for the visitors. With seconds to spare, Mackenzie gets a break away and goes flying down the ice toward the visitors’ net, only to be tripped. Mackenzie cannot take the penalty shot with his twisted knee, so the Buds’ coach calls on Clancy Cooke.
As Clancy responds to fans’ cheers, eying the visitors’ goalie who stands quaking before his net, he dreams of winning the Stanley Cup for Hogtown Maple Buds and securing his place in hockey legend. Can the great Clancy Cooke put the puck in the goal and take the final game into overtime?
Written in rhyme and wonderfully illustrated by the author, Clancy with the Puck, by Chris Mizzoni, is sure to capture the imagination of anyone who has wanted to succeed at something so badly that they could taste it!
FernFolio Editor

Frost by Nicole Luiken

fernfolio — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:12:35 +0000

On the surface of things, seventeen-year old Johnny Van Der Zee has the world by the tail. A talented hockey player, he is being scouted by teams in Ontario, and has a solid chance at a career in the NHL. He is bright, handsome and outgoing, the life of every party, and the most popular guy in his high school. But Johnny is also haunted by demons; the death of his parents in an automobile accident, when he was eight, by his less than wonderful relationship with his aunt and uncle and younger brother, Evan, and by the mysterious, and very dangerous, Frost.
Is Frost human? Is he merely a voice in Johnny’s head? Or is he something far more powerful and lethal? The pale, cold-eyed stranger seems to confront Johnny at every turn, whispering at him, ordering the teenager to do things that push him farther and farther away from those who love and care for him.
He has dumped his long-time girlfriend, Cheryl, and alienated his brother, Evan. He seems to care for his new girlfriend, Kathy, but shuts her out when she tries to figure out what’s going on. With his behaviour becoming increasingly erratic, and his friends and family fed up and annoyed, Johnny begins a final, and very possibly fatal, decent into madness.
Set in Iqaluit during the Arctic winter, Frost is a psychological thriller that will keep your breathless right to the final page.
FernFolio Editor

The Farm Team by Linda Bailey and Bill Slavin

fernfolio — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:32:56 +0000

Every winter, the animals on Stolski’s farm play hockey, practising hard for the big game, the one that will decide the winner of the Stolksi Cup. Though the Farm Team has lost that big game fifty years in a row to their rivals, the Bush League Bandits, they love hockey and they play with heart. All of the farm animals lace on skates and hit the ice, from the goats and sheep, to the geese and the pigs, even those who are too big to fit under the goalie’s net, and are therefore disqualified from playing, and those who are too small to make much of a contribution, like the chickens and Little Pete, a runt of a pig.
The Farm Team awakens the morning of the big game feeling that, this year, they might just have a chance at winning the cup, but that’s before they get a look at their opponents. The Bush League Bandits have assembled the meanest team imaginable, and, right from the opening whistle, it’s clear that they are going to play dirty. Despite the odds, our heroes manage to hold their own until a porcupine playing for the Bandits crashes into the Farm Team’s goalie, Big George, and puts him out of the game. Though Betty, the cow, gamely steps into the nets, and they manage to even the score at three all, the Farm Team knows they are in serious trouble when a new player from the crowd puts on a Bandits jersey. How can they possibly hope to win against a Grizzly?
The Farm Team is a lovely story about a hockey team whose bravery and love of the game help them pull together to overcome enormous odds. Linda Bailey’s tale reminds us that no one is too small or too insignificant to make a contribution, and, to succeed, one must have the courage to dream. Bill Slavin’s illustrations are tender, humourous and gorgeously detailed. Don’t miss this book!
FernFolio Editor

Yossi’s Goal by Ellen Schwartz

fernfolio — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:31:24 +0000

When they fled the pogroms in Russia and made their way to Canada, the inhabitants of Braslav thought they were coming to a land of hope and opportunity. However, though they are free from the fear of soldiers arriving to burn their homes and kill them, Yossi and his family discover that they have traded one form of injustice for another.
While Yossi’s father, Avram, and soon-to-be brother-in-law, Daniel, work long days in the sweatshops of lower Montreal, his mother, Gussie, his seventeen year-old sister, Miriam, and Miriam’s soon-to-be mother-in-law, Sadie, labour over an old sewing machine doing piecework to supplement their meagre income. Yossi sells newspapers on the street and carries bundles for Steiner’s sweat shop before attending school each day. Yet, even with everyone working, the two families can afford only a small two-bedroom apartment, and everyday items such as enough food and warm clothing are always a little beyond their reach. Daniel and Miriam despair of ever earning enough to get married and find their own apartment.
Daniel and other young men who work in the sweat shops decide to organize a walkout in support of better working conditions and higher wages, and begin to meet in secret to plan their protest. Though Yossi is excited by the idea of his friends and their families finally taking action against the unjust working conditions at Steiner’s, he is worried by his father’s objections as well as by Avram’s growing weakness, and fears that Daniel’s actions might bring disaster upon the family.
Yossi is also preoccupied by a exciting new game he has discovered in the streets of Montreal, and by the young French Canadian boys who play it. As he learns more about hockey and makes friends with René, Michel, Jean-Paul and the others, Yossi begins to long for a pair of skates so that he can play, too. But, with his father’s illness and the family’s constant state of poverty, will Yossi ever be able to afford the $2.00 cost of skates?
Yossi’s Goal is a lovely story about the immigrant experiences of poor Russian Jews who came to Canada in the 1890s to escape the pogroms. It is told with humour and tenderness by Ellen Schwartz.
FernFolio Editor